Idle Words

Białowieża Forest

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

One August morning in 2010 I woke up before dawn to go bushwhacking near the Belarussian border. My guide, a friendly Polish geography teacher named Romek, was waiting outside to take me into one of the last patches of primeval wilderness in Europe, Białowieża Forest.

Primeval forest is what covered nearly all of Europe from the time the glaciers receded to the late Middle Ages. It’s the spooky, dense forest of Grimm’s fairy tales, full of danger and beasts (there were lions in these woods!) For anyone used to the tame farm landscape of modern Europe, it takes quite an imaginative leap to realize how threatening and impassable the continent used to be. It’s easier to just come and see it.

In most of Europe primeval forest disappeared as fast as people could cut it down. Today there are only a few stands of it left, mostly in inaccessible corners of the Carpathians and other mountainous areas. Białowieża is unusual both because of its size and because it lies right in the middle of the E-Z-Invasion strip through the Central European plain, not the first place you think of when looking for something that’s been left alone for ten thousand years.

The forest spans the border between Poland and Belarus; the two countries manage it jointly as a strict biosphere reserve. And they mean strict! If I have a heart attack this morning, Romek tells me with a smile, I must not expect an ambulance or helicopter to come get me. Paramedics will arrive on horseback, many hours after I first clutch my chest, and my mortal remains will be dragged out of the forest by cart.

There hasn’t been a motor vehicle in the forest since World War II, and that’s only because a couple of Nazis (of course) needed to unload bodies in a hurry and violated the driving ban. But even the Nazis only did it once. Before them, the last vehicle to enter the forest did so in 1922.

Should I find a feral apple or pear tree (there are a few), I’m allowed to eat the fruit, but I can’t drop the cores. Those have to come back out with us. Strict!

But the greatest temptation in Białowieża grows on the ground. Poles love mushrooms, every family has its expert, and on autumn weekends you will find the forests around any major city getting strip-mined by packs of intent and mutually suspicious day-trippers. We grow up in an atmosphere of scarcity and distrust where mushroom picking is concerned, particularly since it’s considered extremely bad luck to even talk about where to find them, for fear of jinxing yourself.

So visiting Białowieża is like being one of those dogs whose master stacks dozens of treats on its muzzle and just makes it sit there. There is suffering. No hobo passing a pie cooling on a windowsill ever faced greater temptation than the daily procession of Polish day hikers forced to stroll past perfectly formed two-kilo flavor monsters growing right out in the open, the fungal equivalents of a thirty-pound lobster or fist-sized golden nugget.

Like Mordor, one does not simply walk into Białowieża forest. There’s no obstacle preventing it apart from a simple wooden gate, but if you are caught without a guide you pay an enormous fine. God help you if you’ve picked a mushroom. Most visitors confine themselves to a group hike around a loop trail of several miles along an abandoned road bed, but there are longer hikes if you’re willing to get your feet wet and pay for a permit. I figure if I’ve come out all this way to see primeval forest, I should see some primeval forest, and so I spring for the special backwoods hiking permit. It buys me six hours of Romek’s time and the right to go bushwhacking in a more remote area of the forest that sees about forty human beings a year.

You reach the forest by walking through its exact opposite, a beautiful, meticulously groomed English park created for Tsar Alexander III near the end of the 19th century. There are broad lawns between copses of trees which have been selected to give nice color contrasts in the autumn, or to pleasantly offset each other with different shades of green in the summertime. Almost all of these the trees here are rare exotics, many brought from North America at terrific expense and by the express request of the Tsar. It doesn’t do much for me personally to see a Douglas fir, but I can understand why they were a big hit with the Russians.

Beyond the park is a brief stretch of open country that leads to the wooden gate. It is just before daybreak when we arrive, and the world is completely still. Later on there will groups of hikers passing through, but for the moment we have the woods completely to ourselves. The gate opens and I prepare to enter a world of magic.

Instead my first impression is of extreme clutter. It looks exactly like any other Polish forest, except no one has cleared all the dead branches and trees that lean in every direction or just lie rotting on the ground. Some trees have died in place and their bare trunks rise out of the undergrowth like ghostly masts. I fully expect to see the rusted skeleton of an Ursus tractor in between the brambles. The place looks like it could use some pruning and a judicious series of fires. I shoot Romek a wounded glance, but he has already disappeared into the trees.

As we walk deeper into the woods I begin to notice that the trees are very tall. In fact, I’ve never seen broadleaf trees this big before. If they were growing anywhere else there would be a chain around them, a little brass plaque, and a place to park the tour bus, but here they are just average. If you’ve ever been in a redwood forest you will know the feeling. The immensity isn’t immediately obvious because everything is on the same huge scale, but all you have to do is walk up to a trunk to realize that you are now a smurf. What looked like saplings from a distance are perfectly respectable beech or ash or linden that are just completely out of their class here.

From reading descriptions of old-growth forest, I had expected the landscape to be very uneven and hard to cross. The idea is that when a dying tree falls over it tears a big hole in the ground, and the earth trapped in its root system accumulates in a litte hill next to the depression when it rots away, creating a landscape of pits and hillocks.

But where we’re walking the earth is packed and flat, with barely any underbrush. A troop of cub scouts could pitch their tents here with no trouble (though they would quickly find themselves exsanguinated). I shoot Romek a second wounded glance, but he knows the secret of the forest, which is that if you want a complete change of scenery you just have to walk a few hundred steps. Before long I will see my pit-and-hill forest, then bog, thick brambles, tall bushes, and even a kind of oversized lush meadow between the trees, the comically big blades of grass looking like a lawn misrendered at the wrong magnification.

The forest is sensitive to small changes in microclimate and soil chemistry. They determine which species of tree will grow best, and the trees in turn affect everyting else. Some of them engage in ruthless chemical warfare, dropping leaves or seeds that poison the soil for their rivals, or attracting animals to trample the competition. Others suction up water at a prodigious rate to dry out their neighbors. The forest is one giant monument to plant’s inhumanity to plant.

The oak tree has a clever way of eliminating its competition. Boars go insane for the rich taste of acorns, and under every oak you can see what looks like a garden that’s been tilled by a drunken backhoe, where boars in search of a fix have carved up the ground with their tusks. This helps fertilize the tree and uproot all competitors, but at the price of nearly the entire acorn crop. The oak owes its continued existence to forgetful squirrels, who will hide away a store of acorns and nuts for the winter and occasionally forget where they buried it. The little storehouse sprouts the next spring and the crisis is averted for one more generation.

A tree’s life in Białowieża begins with a race to the canopy and never gets significantly easier. As it grows, the sapling has to contend with every kind of opponent, from bark beetles to grazing deer. The ugliest of these is a fat, leathery parasitic mushroom that grows on a tree’s trunk like a shelf, and can kill it in a handful of years. You can count the layers on the ugly thing to get an idea of how long the tree survived before succumbing.

Once the tree dies, the real party begins for the many species that survive on dead lumber. This is where old forest comes into its own, with specialist bugs to eat the rotting wood, specialist woodpeckers to eat the specialist bugs, and onwards through a whole chain of endangered animals and plants designed for the business of tree removal, whose world is confined to a few small areas of forest like this.

The principal large mammals in Białowieża are the bison, moose, wolf, boar, bobcat, and graduate student. The last spends a lengthy juvenile period studying forest theory in Western Europe before migrating in to do field work and possibly mate. The nutrient-rich graduate student is a cornerstone of the forest food pyramid, a conveniently mobile, heated feed bag for a variety of small cosmic horrors. Since there is so little real forest left in Europe, the supply of these initially pink-cheeked graduate students is limitless and easily replenished. If you step quietly, so as not to spook them, you can see them sometimes through the trees, catching frogs with nets, cataloguing the various insects buried in their skin, or peering resignedly into bird holes. They look pale.

As Romek and I walk deeper into the brambles, I find my own interest in the forest reciprocated by a dismaying variety of parasites. Anything with legs, wings and a bloodsucking proboscis has perked up and come to greet us as we enter areas that have gone a long, hungry time since their last warm mammal. The ticks are the most horrifying. Romek is talking to me about the subtleties of forest ecology when I see something with far too many legs run up from his collar directly into his ear canal. He doesn't notice and keeps talking, but unconsciously pokes at his ear with an idle fingertip as I die on the inside. Moments later, of course, I feel a certain scrabbling at my own hairline. Whatever Romek says for the next hour is lost to me as I claw at myself, every once in a while catching a little facehugger that makes a tiny popping sound between my fingernails.

Ticks wait on the tips of leaves and drop on you from above when they detect a plume of your sweet breath. Or else they climb on grass or bushes and will hitch a ride on you as you brush past them. Their instinct is to climb before attaching, so you have a few minutes to intercept them before they reach the Klondike of your scalp or armpit. If you are really tough, you’ll just ignore them and wait until they’ve inflated to their full raisin size a day or two later. “Check your groin when you take a shower!” Romek warns. “They sure do love the groin!”

Providing air support for the ticks are mosquitoes that swarm so densely in places they have to take turns landing on us. We slather ourselves with DEET on the half hour, and the effect is immediate. Now we are only bitten by the mosquitoes that blunder into us at random, while the remainder hover in a confused and hungry cloud.

Later, as we’re leaving the forest, we pass an inbound group of hikers wearing just shorts, t-shirts, and open sandals. Even at the edge of the woods, they already seem mildly uncomfortable and are swatting at the air. My stomach clenches in sympathy knowing what awaits them. Either that, or something has successfully bored its way in.

A paradox of the primeval forest is that nothing in it is very old. The longest-lived organism in the forest is an oak tree, and the most it can reasonably survive before lightning or rot does it in is eight hundred years (1). So while the ecosystem has existed in its present form for over a hundred centuries, the oldest artifacts in this forest are all of human origin.

These are low mounds of earth called kurhany in Polish, курганы in Russian. They are paleolithic gravesites. Some were made for just one person, others hold a number of bodies along with artifacts like pottery shards. Excavations show that they were built by a number of unrelated cultures at different times in the far past, and that they range from opulent to purely utilitarian. Further batallions of graduate students have been deployed to study them.

Early in our walk we cross a section of the forest called ‘Lagery’ (The Camps), which peasants since time out of mind have used as a hiding place in time of war. The giveaway here is a birch tree, the only one I’ll see in the entire forest. To a forester it’s about as blatant a sign of human presence as a lamppost. In a real contest against broadleaf species, the birch has no chance, but as soon as people cut a clearing somewhere, the tree seizes its opportunity to grow. So the vast birch forests emblematic of Eastern Europe are really a memorial to the much mightier forests of years past.

There are less subtle signs of human presence, too. Romek points out a long, slotted board leaning against a tree trunk. It looks like a weathered piece of driftwood. This board used to hang ten meters up the trunk of a nearby tree, suspended like a pendulum over a small hollow in the trunk. Wild bees had made a hive there, and some enterprising human foragers found it and hung the board to protect the hive from bears. A bear could climb the tree and swing the board aside with one paw while still holding on to the trunk, but the board would swing back before the animal had time to reach in and scoop out the sweet, sweet contents. So the poor bear would just hang there getting stung, unable to use both paws without falling out of the tree, staring at the unreachable honeycomb, thinking its thoughts. A small peephole in the board let the insects come and go unimpeded.

This clever device kept all the honey safe for the foragers, who could come back at regular intervals to collect it until they were killed by a furious bear. This particular specimen probably dates back to the eighteenth century.

A little further along, we pass a set of fresh bison hoofprints, which Romek says are extremely rare in this part of the forest. This is not because the European bison (a fearsome, top-heavy beast that looks like an ox wearing a sweater) is rare, but because it prefers to stay in closer proximity to people, in the hope of finding treats. Nothing stirs the heart of a bison faster than the thought of uprooting someone’s vegetable garden. Even though it's the symbol of Białowieża forest, one of the last places on earth where it survives in the wild, wildness is somewhat wasted on the bison, and it must be watched to keep it from sneaking out of its majestic habitat.

The park is also home to a homely little plant called bisongrass (żubrówka), named that because it is one of the very few plants that bison can’t stand and will not eat. Bisongrass is used to flavor a Polish vodka of the same name; the vodka turns a faint yellow green and the dried plant gives it a pleasant herbal taste. Because this grass is endangered, the fines for actually picking it in the wild are astronomical. Special indoor bisongrass plantations supply the vodka industry, though from the way the vodka is marketed you'd think it was collected like dewdrops from right under the noses of the thirsty beasts(2).

The first mention of Białowieża is in 1409, when King Jagiełło used it as a royal meat factory to supply his army for a campaign against the Teutonic Knights. The king and his party arrived in the autumn and hunted through the winter, sending hundreds of barrels of smoked and salted meat down the river to Płock, where his troops waited in winter camp. This was pre-potato Poland, where if you didn’t find a boar to roast you'd be stuck until spring eating bread, sorrel, turnips, onions and beans, so the expedition to Białowieża was a big deal. It was also the closest thing the fifteenth century had to military exercises. The king could test the mettle of his lieutenants by pitting them against various large game, and the survivors would bond afterwards in the mead hall.

That giant hunt whetted a royal appetite that was the key to the forest's survival. The forest became crown territory, a hunting preserve strictly reserved for the king. No one was allowed to enter it without royal leave, even to gather hay, and only the local peasants were given passes to enter. A small cadre of royal game wardens patrolled the lands to keep poachers out. Woe to anyone caught entering the forest with a dog or a firearm. Every few years the king would return in splendor for a few weeks of hunting.

As time passed, these royal hunts grew more decadent. To save the king the discomfort of riding through the forest, carpenters would build a big stage-like dais for the entire royal party, with a large corrall connected to it by a chute. In the weeks before the ‘hunt’, the king’s minions would catch dozens of bison, deer and other game animals alive in nets and fatten them in the corrall.

On the day of the hunt, the King gave his signal and the animals were driven down the chute one by one, emerging directly in front of the platform where the King and Queen could shoot them point blank. A line of servants stood by to clean and reload the royal muskets. A stone obelisk near the park entrance commemorates one of these slaughters in 1759:

On September 27, 1752 His Royal Highness Augustus III, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, along with Her Royal Highness and Princes Xavier and Carl, hunted bison here, killing:

42 bison, of which:

11 large, the greatest weighting 14 hundredweight 50 lb.

7 small

18 cows

6 calves

13 moose, that is:

6 bulls, the greatest weighting 9 hundredweight 75 lbs

5 cows

2 calves

2 deer

Making 57 all together.

Augustus III was no gym rat, so this kind of hunting was just his speed. The queen bagged ten bison while reading a novel.

After the partition of Poland in 1795, Białowieża became Russian territory. The tsars briefly allowed the forest to be logged before recognizing its value as a hunting ground and putting it back under protection. The Russians were the first to survey Białowieża, leaving behind a grid of small stone markers that forest rangers still use today. And since doing things in moderation is not really the Russian way, they imported thousands of game animals in from Siberia and the Caucasus to stock the forest for hunting, badly overstressing (and probably perplexing) the local habitat.

Tsar Alexander III was particularly fond of hunting here, which is why he ordered the fancy English park and wooden palace. Things remained calm until the First World War, when famished German soldiers descended on the forest like boars on an oak grove. Over four years they exterminated essentially every animal in the forest, including the entire remaining wild population of European bison. The bison only escaped extinction thanks to some zoo specimens brought from various European capitals after the war. So thanks to the Germans, all remaining European bison are near-clones of one another.

When the war ended, Poland popped back into existence and resumed stewardship over the forest. The new government sold a logging concession to an English company, which horrified everyone by starting to clear-cut the lumber. The concession was soon taken away.

The forest continued its role as a privileged hunting preserves. Göring and Ciano both visited here before the war, and Göring (who fancied himself a master hunter) made sure the forest remained intact during the occupation. The Nazis confined themselves to massacring the locals and hunting partisans in the woods. Stalin, also an avid hunter, drew the new Soviet-Polish border right down the middle of Białowieża as part of his successful ploy to shift the country bodily a hundred miles west. The story has it that he intended to annex the entire thing, but took pity on Polish communists who also wanted somewhere to go hunting.

The grateful Polish comrades adorned Alexander III’s beautiful park with a two-story turd of advanced socialist architecture called the Hunting Lodge. In its day this was a very exclusive mini-hotel for entertaining visiting dignitaries from fraternal nations. A whole book could (and should) be written about the Communist obsession with hunting. Poland was no exception, and the likes of Tito, Ceaușescu, and the gorgeously named Valéry Giscard d’Estaing all helicoptered in for a quick murderous visit to the woods. Today the lodge stands empty, though still maintained, a series of lovely flower gardens surrounding it making a contrast with that special Brezhnev-era concrete that somehow looked filthy from the moment it was poured.

Towards noon, Romek and I emerge onto the main forest trail, a broad dirt path wide enough for horse-drawn carts to come through. These take people with limited mobility (or unlimited laziness) on a short loop along the edge of the forest, where some of the biggest oaks are. The sun has come out and is streaming down through the leaves in thick beams like a bad inspirational poster. The light is not only lovely but makes it easier to avoid the trampoline-sized spiderwebs suspended between the trees, where many-eyed spiders as big as a hazelnut sit and await their supper. Romek exchanges greetings with every guide we pass; most of them are leading clusters of German or English-speaking tourists from oak to oak. Soon after that we're back out in the open fields, in one of the most placid landscapes in Europe.

As I climb into bed back at the hotel, I try to summon a deep, National Geographic-style thought about the meaning of this place and my role in it. Instead, I quickly pass out. This teaches me that, given ideal weather conditions, modern clothing, and a thermos full of coffee, I would survive for under twelve hours in primeval forest before a passing wolf found my sleeping body and made me one with nature again.

But it's a hell of a place!

(1) There’s a lovely custom in Poland of baptizing notable oaks and giving them proper names. The reigning old-timer in Poland is a giant named Bolesław, who sprouted from an acorn in about the year 1200.

(2) Apart from a blade of bisongrass, each bottle of this vodka also includes an implicit raised middle finger to the Latin alphabet, in the form of the magnificent Polish word źdźbło (blade of grass). That last vowel represents the rest of the word laughing at you after you have tried to pronounce it.

Why Arabic Is Terrific

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called the Defense Language Institute, where young men and women learn how to eavesdrop on the nation's enemies, provided that the enemies speak slowly and limit their conversation to hobbies and the weather.

The DLI is big on hiring native speakers, and ever since the scary men in turbans replaced godless Communism as a mortal threat to America it has not been hard to find good hummus in Monterey. About two thousand soldiers grind their way through a sixty-three week intensive Arabic program each year, while about sixty civilians attend the unrelated and much shorter programs at MIIS.

Of course, now that Arabic is the key language for career advancement in places that have no sign out front and a large eagle emblem in the lobby, the civilian programs have begun started to attract the kinds of calculating douchebags who used to make studying Russian so unpleasant. They are still in the minority, but having even one of these guys (and they're always guys) in your class can lead to needless suffering *.

So I would like to stand up for the language nerds and give some reasons for studying Arabic that have nothing to do with politics. The language of the National Designated Other is bound to switch to Chinese in a couple of years, but until colleges start teaching Martian, Arabic is going to remain the strangest, most interesting language you can study in an undergrad classroom.

And don't fall for the bait and switch with Chinese or Japanese! They might tempt you with an exotic writing system, but after a few months you find out that the underlying language is pretty vanilla, and meanwhile there is a stack of three thousand flash cards standing in between you and the ability to skim a newspaper.

Arabic, on the other hand, twists healthy minds in twelve ways:

The Root/Pattern System

Nearly all Arabic words consist of a three-consonant root slotted into a pattern of vowels and helper consonants. The root gives the word its base meaning, while the pattern modifies this meaning in a systematic and predictable way. This idea is so cool that you'd think it came from a constructed language, and yet Arabic has actual native speakers who live completely normal lives and will not try to talk to you about Runescape.

For example, the pattern ma--a-, where the hyphens are placeholders for three root consonants, is nearly always a place name in Arabic. The pattern i-a-a-a generates a verb meaning "to cause someone to do X", where the meaning of X is determined by that three-consonant root.

Here are some common patterns using the root k t b, whose basic meaning is 'writing':

pattern	pattern meaning		result
m--a-a	place name	مكتبة	maktaba (library)
-aa-i-	active participle	كاتب	kaatib (writer)
ma--uu-	passive participle	مكتوب	maktuub (written)
-a-a-a	basic verb	كتب	kataba (to write)
a--a-a	causative verb	أكتب	aktaba (to dictate)
-i-aa-	noun	كتاب	kitaab (book)
-u-u-	plural noun	كتب	kutub (books)

The root/pattern approach really goes crazy with verbs. There are ten common verb patterns in Arabic, and each one alters the base meaning in a semi-predictable way.

For example, putting a verb into pattern IV will often make it causative (baqaa - to stay vs. abqii - to keep in place), while putting a transitive verb into pattern VI tends to make it reflexive (thakara - to remind; tathakara - to remember). These meanings are not completely predictable, but you can use them to make very good guesses about new vocabulary.

There's even a verb pattern (IX) devoted entirely to changes in color and acquiring a physical disability.

Broken Plurals

In English, you make most words plural by adding a suffix, except for a very small number of words (like 'feet') where there is a vowel change instead. Arabic does this the other way around. There are a few words that take a regular plural suffix, but most of the time to make a plural you have to change the structure of the word quite dramatically:

kitaab	->	kutub	(book)
ustaath	->	asaatitha	(teacher)
maqha	->	maqaahi	(café)
dukkan	->	dakaakiin	(store)
ahdar	->	hudur	(green)

This holds even for borrowed words:

film -> aflaam

jaakit -> jawaakat

Other Semitic languages have broken plurals, but as with other unusual language features Arabic runs this one furthest into the end zone.

The Writing System

The Arabic writing system is exotic looking but easy to learn, which is a rare combination. The language uses a straightforward alphabet, but because letters change their shape depending on what their neighbors are it is quite impenetrable to the uninitiated.

For exmaple, here are some "words" consisting of a single letter repeated three times:

ييي ععع ههه ككك للل

You can easily master Arabic writing without learning the language (here is a great book for it if you're interested); it will take you about two weeks. Go to the museum and impress your date with your ability to appreciate Arabic calligraphy on a deeper level!

Dual

Arabic has a grammatical dual — a special form for talking about two of something. That means there's a distinct set of verb conjugations for 'you two' and 'them two' (but not 'we two'!), along with adjective and noun suffixes for pairs of things. This is pretty cool.

Plural Lite

Some words have separate broken plurals depending on whether you're talking about a small or large number (the cutoff is somewhere around seven).

The Feminine Plural

Formal Arabic distinguishes between groups composed entirely of women and groups that contain one or more men, and has distinct pronouns, plural forms, and verb conjugations for feminine dual and feminine plural.

This gives Arabic a total of twelve personal pronouns. No other language will make you work as hard to avoid speaking formally to pairs of women.

Crazy Agreement Rules

Arabic has a number of very unusual agreement rules. My absolute favorite is that all non-human plurals are grammatically feminine singular:

al-kutub hadra' (الكتب حضراء)

"The books, she is green"

Phonetics

Several enjoyable consonants wait to greet the foreign learner. Most of these are emphatic consonants, which are just like the familiar consonants /k/, /t/, /th/, /s/ and /d/ except that as you pronounce them you must simultaneously try to swallow your tongue.

And then there is this beast: ع a consonant pronounced so far back in the throat that you must wait two hours after eating to safely attempt it. Naturally it's one of the most common sounds in the language.

Arabic also treats the glottal stop (a soundless catch in the throat) as a regular consonant. Glottal stops are everywhere in English but we are not trained to hear them, so a long portion of one of your first Arabic classes will be devoted to blowing your mind with the fact that English words like 'apple' and 'elegant' do not start with a vowel.

Funky Numbers

What we call Arabic numerals aren't used in Arabic except in extraordinarily formal contexts. Instead, Arabic uses "Indian numerals", which look like this:

٩ ٨ ٧ ٦ ٥ ٤ ٣ ٢ ١

These are just similar enough to English to ensure that you will always, always do exercise 10 when assigned exercise 15.

The names of the numbers come with truly terrifying agreement rules, like "if the number is greater than three but less than eleven, it must take the opposite gender of the noun that it modifies". Since it so much easier to talk about unspecified plurals (which you'll remember are always feminine singular!), this gives foreign students of Arabic a positively Oriental tendency towards vagueness.

Arabs themselves just ignore the agreement rules altogether and talk about whatever number of things they want.

Unlike the rest of the language, numerals are written left-to-right, and pronunced left-to-right until you get to the tens place. So ٣٤٦٢ is read "three thousand four hundred two and sixty". This is particularly fun when talking about date ranges, since the earlier date will be written on the right side of the hyphen, but read from left to right:

١٩٢٣-١٩٤٥

Diglossia

Muslims believe that Arabic as written in the 7th century A.D. is the language of divine revalation. This has served as a tremendously conservative force on written Arabic, with two important consequences.

The first is that texts from over a thousand years ago remain accessible to modern readers. If you're an English speaker, where even texts from 200 years ago can be rough going, this is quite a treat.

The second is that spoken Arabic has diverged substantially from the written language, so you can study it formally for years and not be able to understand a television commercial.

This is where it really helps to love language study. Arabic has a large number of dialects, some of which are not mutually intelligible, but all educated Arabs will know the formal written language, which they consider to be a higher form of their day-to-day speech. This 'higher' language is used in speeches, news programs, lectures and other formal contexts, but never in casual conversation unless differences in dialect make it absolutely necessary. The combination of numerous dialects and a formal/informal continuum is pretty much unique to Arabic and gives rise to fascinating situations watching Arabs calibrate their lanugage based on the situation and the linguistic background of their interlocutor.

Learning Materials

Nearly every Arabic program in the country uses a four-part textbook and DVD series called Al-Kitaab . Even after studying from it for three years you won't be able to find enough words to express how terrific it is, particularly if you've been exposed to Arabic teaching materials. The books are stuffed full of authentic texts, and there isn't any of the usual filler or pointless mechanical practice that plagues other textbooks of "hard" languages.

At the more advanced level, I strongly recommend the Anthology of Arabic Literature and the very idiosyncratic All the Arabic You Should Have Learned The First Time Around.

Finally, for a more detailed and informed geek-out about the Arabic language, please see this excellent short essay from Indiana University.

1. There's something about intelligence agencies - maybe the familiar comfort of a three-letter acronym on the wall, maybe the late-night spanking parties - that draws fraternity boys like ants to a picnic, and right now the road to bro advancement leads through an Arabic classroom. Their complete lack of a sense of irony allows these students to combine sincere appreciation for The Fountainhead with a desire for a lifelong career in government service, and the hardest part of studying Arabic is having to listen to their asinine opinions after they have gained enough proficiency to try to express them.

On Top Of The World

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Getting groceries means having to cross the 70th parallel, which fills me with an unjustifiable sense of regret. There's something glorious about being out and about in my shirtsleeves at 70˚N that loses all its savor down at 69˚59'. Never mind that I am still north of all of mainland Canada, north of Alaska (except for a tiny sliver of the North Slope) and very much north of you. We draw arbitrary lines on the globe and then behave in ways that give them a ghostly reality. I didn't come all this way to be walking south!

But my stomach is rumbling, and a three mile walk southeast is the only way to get supplies on this island, population 43, where the room-sized grocery store operates more like an exclusive Parisian boutique, requiring you to ring the doorbell and wait for the yawning proprietor to come downstairs and let you in. Of course, since this is Norway, you then get to shop unmolested while he waits behind the little cash register.

Arriving on the island, my host and I foolishly leave our grocery bags and luggage on the beach for half an hour so we can go off to moor the boat. Birds are not stupid. I lose a package of cheese and some sliced ham; for him the damage is more serious, a tall can of stout punctured well below the beerline by a knowing beak. Dark foam is still oozing into the sand when we come back, and with great care we rush the wounded can into the main house like a fallen comrade. Beer is always precious, but it is so much more precious when replacing it means a ninety minute boat ride.

In their alcoholic frenzy, the birds have unfortunately overlooked a delicious bread of incredible density, bought at a bakery back in Tromsø. Perhaps its armored crust was just too much for them. Though modest in size, the providential loaf will last me for the entire week, and every day reveals some surprise ingredient - raisins, currants, whole apricots! - when I saw off another slice.

The island I am staying on is called Spildra, a little rectangular block of land about four miles long in the Kvænangen fjord in northern Norway. At these latitudes, if you build a farm, you get a dot on the map, and the homestead here is called Skaga. My host is an anthropologist named Ivar, who rents the cabin to strangers like me through an elegant little website. Ivar and his family divide their time between here and a house in Tromsø, about three hours away by boat, a university town of about 60,000. After a week on Spildra, Tromsø begins to feel like a metropolis of unimaginable immensity.

The grocery store is at a dot marked Dunvik. The amenities at Dunvik don't stop with just the shopping. There's electricity, a pier for the ferry, a breakwater, a road, and even a couple of public Dumpsters (which will be very welcome to me at the end of my visit). Both the shop and the little booth that serves as a post office display a handsome wooden sign with 'Store' and 'Post Office' carved out in Russian. This is the work of Ivar's friend Yuri, a prolific woodcarver and frequent visitor to the island. Yuri is one of those preternaturally handy people; the top shelf of the grocery store is lined with elegant little birds made of birch bark, which he sells there on commisison. He also built the very Russian cabin I'll be staying in for a week up at Skaga.

The cabin started out as a banya (Russian sauna), but it ended up looking so nice that Ivar couldn't resist the temptation to turn it into a guest house instead. The building retains the typical banya floor plan (a main room where you are expected to cool off and eat, a small room for steaming) but the hot stones and benches have been replaced by a pair of seriously comfortable beds. The only concession to the Norwegian location is the cabin's curious sod roof, unheard of in Russia but typical for this region. You lay down a layer of sod with the grass side down, and then you cover it with another layer grass side up and let it grow. The result is a warm, shaggy roof that waves in the breeze and occasionally even sprouts flowers. The sheep stare at it with longing.

"I find I sleep about five hours a night in summer," Ivar tells me over dinner my first night on the island. I nod in complete understanding, carry my precious loaf back to the cabin, and wake up twelve hours later. At no point in the week will I sleep fewer than ten hours, and on those days I'll feel groggy and require a fortifying nap. I try to play it cool and pretend like I am not spending half my vacation asleep, but my chimney betrays me. Ivar can see when the smoke starts rising around noon, and my feeble attempts to pretend that I enjoy four or five hours of brisk morning reading before firing up the wood stove fool no one.

Apparently the long hours of daylight and marine air do strange things to visitors. The sun will not set here until late July, and it orbits the sky in a tilted circle, shining high above the southern mountains at midday, and passing just above the northern horizon at midnight. When there are no clouds, it is a spectacular light show. Shadows stretch out into the distance, colors get warmer and warmer, and the nostalgic golden hour that I always associate with late summer afternoons lasts the whole night long.

But clear days are rare on Spildra, as if it were too much beauty for mortals to bear. Much more typical is fog or overcast, sometimes blowing in on a strong wind. On those cloudy days the light at midnight feels like dusk on a winter day, or the peculiar darkness just before a heavy thunderstorm. I can't read without lighting candles, or else holding my book right up against the window pane. There is a subconscious feeling like it is just about to grow dark, but of course it never does.

Life at Skaga is low-tech. The generator in the boathouse stays off unless there is a specific need. I may have found the one place in the world where I am out of range of the World Cup. The bathroom is a handsome A-frame outhouse decorated with official portraits of Norwegian royalty. Deposits collect in a steel drum that gets composted for two years and then goes onto the potato patch. There is running water from a spigot outside the cabin, brought down through a 900 meter long hose running up the cliffs to a nearby lake. The water is an unappetizing brown color from suspended rust, but tastes just fine. When the sun comes out for any length of time it warms the dark hose, and the water comes out at nearly body temperature. On cloudy days, scrubbing dishes chills the hands fast.

The easiest and most pleasant way to get clean is in the banya proper, which sits on a crag overlooking the open water and the little square beach. You feed the voracious stove with amazingly quick-burning little birch logs, and wait. Once the windows have fogged up you can enjoy the rare luxury of feeling excessively warm.

Most of the inhabitants on the island are sheep, who stay busy at their task of turning all of the grass on the island into slippery little piles of sheep shit. The adults have recently been shorn and look a little pitiful. The lambs are still small at this time of year and stay right by their mothers, whose sunken sides and full udders testify to the demands of parenthood. When a lamb wants to nurse it runs up to its ewe and head-butts her hard right in the udder, then kneels down on its front legs to suckle.

The sheep are a useful weather-gage. On dry or sunny days, they surround the main house and cabin, chewing placidly. When they disappear, you know it's about to get a little miserable. You can find them hiding in crags and overhangs further inland, waiting for whatever storm is coming through to blow itself out. When the weather eases a bit, they crowd in the lee of the boathouse, or try to fit under the little elevated hut used for fish-drying.

They have chewed the grass down to stubble length everywhere except the little rectangles of fenced-off land immediately surrounding the main house and cabin, which are still lush and green. The sheep stare at this with unspeakable longing. The smaller lambs have figured out that they can squeeze through the fencing, or sneak under it in places, and every once in a while a lamb will infiltrate the compound and enjoy sheep heaven for a few minutes until I come out yelling and scare it off into the wilderness.

The sheep get their revenge on me at night, when a well-timed 'baa' right outside the window, or a knock or two against the wall, can be quite startling, particularly on the nights when Ivar has gone and I am the only person on my half of the island.

Some of the sheep have grown used to getting a treat and will overcome their fear in order to slowly approach you and stare deep into your eyes with their strange barred pupils. For a moment, you experience a feeling of spiritual communion across the vast gulf that separates man from sheep, a strange feeling of being in communication with an utterly different mind. Then the sheep releases a terrific stream of urine. And, if you want, you can do the same.

An Annotated Letter From Roman Polanski

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Roman Polański, who is in Switzerland awaiting extradition to the US for the 1977 rape of a thirteen year old girl*, has just released a fascinating open letter, which I have reprinted here with my comments.

Polański's letter reads:

Throughout my seven months since September 26, 2009, the date of my arrest at Zurich Airport, where I had landed with a view to receiving a lifetime award for my work from the representative of the Swiss Minister of Culture, I have refrained from making any public statements and have requested my lawyers to confine their comments to a bare minimum. I wanted the legal authorities of Switzerland and the United States, as well as my lawyers, to do their work without any polemics on my part.
I have decided to break my silence in order to address myself directly to you without any intermediaries and in my own words.
I have had my share of dramas and joys, as we all have, and I am not going to try to ask you to pity my lot in life. I ask only to be treated fairly like anyone else.
It is true: 33 years ago I pleaded guilty, and I served time at the prison for common law crimes at Chino, not in a VIP prison. That period was to have covered the totality of my sentence. By the time I left prison, the judge had changed his mind and claimed that the time served at Chino did not fulfil the entire sentence, and it is this reversal that justified my leaving the United States.

Polański refers here to 42 days he spent in Chino under 'psychiatric evaluation' prior to sentencing. The sentence was never pronounced, because Polański ran away. Polański made a plea bargain that allowed him to plead guilty to a lesser charge (statutory rape) with the understanding that he would then be sentenced to time served. Given that he raped a child, it was a pretty terrific plea bargain. But right before sentencing, Polański got cold feet, believing the judge would renege on the plea agreement.

In the California legal system, if you think a judge has been unfair to you, or reneged on a binding plea agreement, there is a process you can follow. Unfortunately, that process is not "flee the country". So Polański is not even complaining that an injustice was done to him - he's claiming that an injustice was about to be done to him.

This affair was roused from its slumbers of over three decades by a documentary film-maker who gathered evidence from persons involved at the time. I took no part in that project, either directly or indirectly. The resulting documentary not only highlighted the fact that I left the United States because I had been treated unjustly; it also drew the ire of the Los Angeles authorities, who felt that they had been attacked and decided to request my extradition from Switzerland, a country I have been visiting regularly for over 30 years without let or hindrance.

The affair has slumbered for thirty years because Polański has carefully been slipping it quaaludes. Since his exile, he has taken exquisite pains to avoid being extradited. But last year, he finally got sloppy, and gave the US authorities enough advance warning to get the cumbersome extradition paperwork filed in time for a well-publicized appearance in Switzerland.

I can now remain silent no longer! I can remain silent no longer because the American authorities have just decided, in defiance of all the arguments and depositions submitted by third parties, not to agree to sentence me in absentia even though the same Court of Appeal recommended the contrary.

In the American legal system, if you plead guilty to a crime, you show up to hear sentence pronounced on yourself. The only possible reason Polański has to demand sentencing in absentia is so he can decide whether the sentence is something he'd like to come back to serve. Given his record, what sane court would agree to this?

I can remain silent no longer because the California court has dismissed the victim’s numerous requests that proceedings against me be dropped, once and for all, to spare her from further harassment every time this affair is raised once more.

This remarkable statement reveals the extent of Polański's moral transformation. Thirty years ago, when he was raping a thirteen year old girl, giving her alcohol and quaaludes, and sodomizing her, he showed minimal concern for his victim's numerous requests that he stop, that he not take her clothes off, that he let her leave. But the passage of time has sharpened Polański's moral sensitivity to such a point that it causes him pain even to see her harassed and badgered by the indelicate people who would keep bringing up the painful matter of his crime.

Despite this laudable, if belated, concern for the rights of his victim, this is not how our legal system works. We pass laws against child rape because we don't want to live in a society where people can go around raping children with impunity, regardless of whether those victims later forgive the rapist and want the matter put behind them.

Second, the extradition isn't even about the rape case, but the rule of law. Polański pled and fled, and he wants to get away with it. The California D.A. argues that it is a bad idea to let felons go free after pleading guilty if they don't feel they'll like the sentence. There's not a lot of gray area here.

Polański wants to focus all attention on his original crime, apparently unaware that social mores have changed drastically when it comes to child rape since the 1970's. But it is the duty of the LA prosecutor, whatever he thinks of Polański's offense, to bring him to justice for jumping bail.

I can remain silent no longer because there has just been a new development of immense significance. On February 26 last, Roger Gunson, the deputy district attorney in charge of the case in 1977, now retired, testified under oath before Judge Mary Lou Villar in the presence of David Walgren, the present deputy district attorney in charge of the case, who was at liberty to contradict and question him, that on September 16, 1977, Judge Rittenband stated to all the parties concerned that my term of imprisonment in Chino constituted the totality of the sentence I would have to serve.

Notice the key words here, "testified under oath". There is an institution designed especially to settle the kinds of questions Polański raises about his former judge. But Polański, despite access to enormous funds to pay for a legal defense, does not have the courage to make his case in open court, even while seizing eagerly on the testimony of others. If his case is so clear, so unassailable that he can no longer remain silent in the face of injustice, why would it not be clear in an LA courtroom?

I can remain silent no longer because the request for my extradition addressed to the Swiss authorities is founded on a lie. In the same statement, retired deputy district attorney Roger Gunson added that it was false to claim, as the present district attorney’s office does in their request for my extradition, that the time I spent in Chino was for the purpose of a diagnostic study. The said request asserts that I fled in order to escape sentencing by the U.S. judicial authorities, but under the plea-bargaining process I had acknowledged the facts and returned to the United States in order to serve my sentence. All that remained was for the court to confirm this agreement, but the judge decided to repudiate it in order to gain himself some publicity at my expense.
I can remain silent no longer because for over 30 years my lawyers have never ceased to insist that I was betrayed by the judge, that the judge perjured himself, and that I served my sentence. Today it is the deputy district attorney who handled the case in the 1970s, a man of irreproachable reputation, who has confirmed all my statements under oath, and this has shed a whole new light on the matter.

Wow, this sure does sound exculpatory! If only there were some kind of institution whose job it was to hear these kind of claims, and settle them.

Polański seems content to base his defense on the testimony of court officers, laying great weight on the fact that they are testifying under oath, but does not consider it appropriate to appear in court himself. All of the people Polański claimed wronged him (by considering a sentence longer than forty days for child rape!) have long since died or retired. But even though he can remain silent no longer, he continues to remain silent in the one venue where his words would have any meaning.

I can remain silent no longer because the same causes are now producing the same effects. The new District Attorney, who is handling this case and has requested my extradition, is himself campaigning for election and needs media publicity! I can no longer remain silent because the United States continues to demand my extradition more to serve me on a platter to the media of the world than to pronounce a judgment concerning which an agreement was reached 33 years ago.

At what point does Polański think it would have been an appropriate time to stop demanding his extradition? He stood before a California court, pleaded guilty and then ran away. Should the police cars have stopped at the county line, Dukes of Hazzard style?

I can remain silent no longer because I have been placed under house arrest in Gstaad and bailed in very large sum of money which I have managed to raise only by mortgaging the apartment that has been my home for over 30 years, and because I am far from my family and unable to work.

You see what happens when you rape children! House arrest in Gstaad! Let this be a lesson to others.

Such are the facts I wished to put before you in the hope that Switzerland will recognize that there are no grounds for extradition, and that I shall be able to find peace, be reunited with my family, and live in freedom in my native land.

Imagine anybody else, someone who is not a celebrity, raping a thirteen year old girl, admitting to lesser charges as part of a guilty plea, and then fleeing before sentencing to live abroad. Now imagine a D.A. with the opportunity to have the criminal brought to face the consequences of his crime, but deciding instead to give the him a pass because he believes the presiding judge made a mess of the case. It would be unheard of, a complete miscarriage of justice, and we would have that D.A. on the pillory.

Polański asks in this letter to be 'treated fairly, like anybody else'. And in this I wholeheartedly agree with him, and wish him a safe journey back to California.

----

* If you're not familiar with the Polański case, I urge you to read the pretty wrenching deposition posted on the Smoking Gun, an account that Polański does not contest. In summary, he pressured a thirteen year old girl into taking off her clothes, gave her alcohol and quaaludes, then vaginally and anally raped her. The judge in the case sent him to prison for psychiatric observation, and he agreed to plead guilty to a lesser crime, statutory rape, in the belief that he would be sentenced to time served. Shortly before sentencing, Polański fled the country, fearing that the judge would renege on the plea agreement and make him do hard time. France has refused to extradite him (he is a French citizen) but last year the U.S. authorities finally caught up with him in Switzerland.

Scott And Scurvy

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Recently I have been re-reading one of my favorite books, The Worst Journey in the World, an account of Robert Falcon Scott's 1911 expedition to the South Pole. I can’t do the book justice in a summary, other than recommend that you drop everything and read it, but there is one detail that particularly baffled me the first time through, and that I resolved to understand better once I could stand to put the book down long enough.

Writing about the first winter the men spent on the ice, Cherry-Garrard casually mentions an astonishing lecture on scurvy by one of the expedition’s doctors:

Atkinson inclined to Almroth Wright’s theory that scurvy is due to an acid intoxication of the blood caused by bacteria...
There was little scurvy in Nelson’s days; but the reason is not clear, since, according to modern research, lime-juice only helps to prevent it. We had, at Cape Evans, a salt of sodium to be used to alkalize the blood as an experiment, if necessity arose. Darkness, cold, and hard work are in Atkinson’s opinion important causes of scurvy.

Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be mixed in with sailors’ grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long ocean voyages.

But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened?

...

By all accounts scurvy is a horrible disease. Scott, who has reason to know, gives a succinct description:

The symptoms of scurvy do not necessarily occur in a regular order, but generally the first sign is an inflamed, swollen condition of the gums. The whitish pink tinge next the teeth is replaced by an angry red; as the disease gains ground the gums become more spongy and turn to a purplish colour, the teeth become loose and the gums sore. Spots appear on the legs, and pain is felt in old wounds and bruises; later, from a slight oedema, the legs, and then the arms, swell to a great size and become blackened behind the joints. After this the patient is soon incapacitated, and the last horrible stages of the disease set in, from which death is a merciful release.

One of the most striking features of the disease is the disproportion between its severity and the simplicity of the cure. Today we know that scurvy is due solely to a deficiency in vitamin C, a compound essential to metabolism that the human body must obtain from food. Scurvy is rapidly and completely cured by restoring vitamin C into the diet.

Except for the nature of vitamin C, eighteenth century physicians knew this too. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another.

An unfortunate series of accidents conspired with advances in technology to discredit the cure for scurvy. What had been a simple dietary deficiency became a subtle and unpredictable disease that could strike without warning. Over the course of fifty years, scurvy would return to torment not just Polar explorers, but thousands of infants born into wealthy European and American homes. And it would only be through blind luck that the actual cause of scurvy would be rediscovered, and vitamin C finally isolated, in 1932.

It is not easy to find fresh foods that lack vitamin C. Plants and animals tend to be full of it, since the molecule is used in all kinds of biochemical synthesis as an electron donor. But the same reactive qualities that make the vitamin useful also make it easy to destroy. Vitamin C quickly breaks down in the presence of light, heat and air. For this reason it is absent from most preserved foods that have been cooked or dried. Its destruction is also rapidly catalyzed by copper ions, which may be one reason sailors, with their big copper cooking vats, were particularly susceptible.

Because our bodies can't synthesize the vitamin, they have grown very good at conserving it. It takes up to six months for scurvy to develop in healthy people after vitamin C is removed from the diet, and only a tiny daily amount is enough to keep a person healthy.

It has been known since antiquity that fresh foods in general, and lemons and oranges in particular, will cure scurvy. Starting with Vasco de Gama’s crew in 1497, sailors have repeatedly discovered the curative power of citrus fruits, and the cure has just as frequently been forgotten or ignored by subsequent explorers.

Lind tends to get the credit for discovering the citrus cure since he performed something approaching a controlled experiment. But it took an additional forty years of experiments, analysis, and political lobbying for his result to become institutionalized in the Royal Navy. In 1799, all Royal Navy ships on foreign service were ordered to serve lemon juice:

The scheduled allowance for the sailors in the Navy was fixed at I oz.lemon juice with I + oz. sugar, served daily after 2 weeks at sea, the lemon juice being often called ‘lime juice’ and our sailors ‘lime juicers’. The consequences of this new regulation were startling and by the beginning of the nineteenth century scurvy may be said to have vanished from the British navy. In 1780, the admissions of scurvy cases to the Naval Hospital at Haslar were 1457; in the years from 1806 to 1810, they were two.

(As we'll see, the confusion between lemons and limes would have serious reprecussions.)

Scurvy had been the leading killer of sailors on long ocean voyages; some ships experienced losses as high as 90% of their men. With the introduction of lemon juice, the British suddenly held a massive strategic advantage over their rivals, one they put to good use in the Napoleonic wars. British ships could now stay out on blockade duty for two years at a time, strangling French ports even as the merchantmen who ferried citrus to the blockading ships continued to die of scurvy, prohibited from touching the curative themselves.

The success of lemon juice was so total that much of Sicily was soon transformed into a lemon orchard for the British fleet. Scurvy continued to be a vexing problem in other navies, who were slow to adopt citrus as a cure, as well as in the Merchant Marine, but for the Royal Navy it had become a disease of the past.

By the middle of the 19th century, however, advances in technology were reducing the need for any kind of scurvy preventative. Steam power had shortened travel times considerably from the age of sail, so that it was rare for sailors other than whalers to be months at sea without fresh food. Citrus juice was a legal requirement on all British vessels by 1867, but in practical terms it was becoming superfluous.

So when the Admiralty began to replace lemon juice with an ineffective substitute in 1860, it took a long time for anyone to notice. In that year, naval authorities switched procurement from Mediterranean lemons to West Indian limes. The motives for this were mainly colonial - it was better to buy from British plantations than to continue importing lemons from Europe. Confusion in naming didn't help matters. Both "lemon" and "lime" were in use as a collective term for citrus, and though European lemons and sour limes are quite different fruits, their Latin names (citrus medica, var. limonica and citrus medica, var. acida) suggested that they were as closely related as green and red apples. Moreover, as there was a widespread belief that the antiscorbutic properties of lemons were due to their acidity, it made sense that the more acidic Caribbean limes would be even better at fighting the disease.

In this, the Navy was deceived. Tests on animals would later show that fresh lime juice has a quarter of the scurvy-fighting power of fresh lemon juice. And the lime juice being served to sailors was not fresh, but had spent long periods of time in settling tanks open to the air, and had been pumped through copper tubing. A 1918 animal experiment using representative samples of lime juice from the navy and merchant marine showed that the 'preventative' often lacked any antiscorbutic power at all.

By the 1870s, therefore, most British ships were sailing without protection against scurvy. Only speed and improved nutrition on land were preventing sailors from getting sick.

It fell to the unfortunate George Nares to discover this fact in 1875, when he led the British Arctic Expedition in an attempt to reach the North Pole via Greenland. Some oceanographic theories of the time posited an open polar sea, and Nares was directed to sail along the Greenland coast, then take a sledging party and see how far north he could get on the pack ice.

The expedition was a fiasco. Two men in the sledging party developed scurvy within days of leaving the ship. Within five weeks, half the men were sick, and despite having laid depots with plentiful supplies for their return journey, they were barely able to make it back. A rescue party sent to intercept them found that lime juice failed to have its usual dramatic effect. Most damning of all, some of the men who stayed on the ship, never failing to take their daily dose, also got scurvy.

The failure of the Nares expedition provoked an uproar in Britain. The Royal Navy believed itself capable of sustaining any crew for two years without signs of scurvy, yet here was an able and adequately supplied crew crippled by the disease within weeks. For the first time since the eighteenth century, the effectiveness of citrus juice as an absolute preventative was in doubt.

More troubling evidence came several years later, during the Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition to Franz-Josef Land in 1894. Members of this expedition spent three years on a ship frozen into the pack ice. Koettlitz, their chief physician, describes what happened:

The expedition proper ate fresh meat regularly at least once a day in the shape of polar bear. The people on the ship had, however, a prejudice against this food, which certainly was not particularly palatable, and insisted, against all advice, upon eating their preserved and salted meat. This meat I occasionally noticed to be somewhat "high" or "gamey", and afterwards heard that it was often so. The result was that, though I visited the ship every day, and personally saw that each man swallowed his dose of lime juice (which was made compulsory, and was of the best quality), the whole ship’s company were tainted with scurvy, and two died.

This pattern of fresh meat preventing scurvy would be a consistent one in Arctic exploration. It defied the common understanding of scurvy as a deficiency in vegetable matter. Somehow men could live for years on a meat-only diet and remain healthy, provided that the meat was fresh.

This is a good example of how the very ubiquity of vitamin C made it hard to identify. Though scurvy was always associated with a lack of greens, fresh meat contains adequate amounts of vitamin C, with particularly high concentrations in the organ meats that explorers considered a delicacy. Eat a bear liver every few weeks and scurvy will be the least of your problems.

But unless you already understand and believe in the vitamin model of nutrition, the notion of a trace substance that exists both in fresh limes and bear kidneys, but is absent from a cask of lime juice because you happened to prepare it in a copper vessel, begins to sound pretty contrived.

Doctors of the era looked at this puzzling evidence and wondered. Other diseases had recently been shown to have their source in bacterial infection. The bacterial model was new, and had already had spectacular success in identifying and treating diseases like typhus, tuberculosis, and cholera. What if the cause of scruvy had also been misunderstood? What if instead of a deficiency disease, scurvy was actually a kind of chronic food poisoning from bacterial contamination of meat? Thus was born the ptomaine theory of scurvy, and Koettlitz became its enthusiastic backer:

That the cause of the outbreak of scurvy in so many Polar expeditions has always been that something was radically wrong with the preserved meats, whether tinned or salted, is practically certain; that foods are scurvy-producing by being, if only slightly, tainted is practically certain; that the benefit of the so-called "antiscorbutics" is a delusion, and that some antiscorbutic property has been removed from foods in the process of preservation is also a delusion. An animal food is either scorbutic - in other words, scurvy-producing - or it is not. It is either tainted or it is sound. Putrefactive change, if only slight and tasteless, has taken place or it has not. Bacteria have been able to produce ptomaines in it or they have not; and if they have not, then the food is healthy and not scurvy-producing.

The ’ptomaine’ in the theory was never really defined, other than as a noxious waste product of bacterial action. But the theory had an internal logic. Poorly preserved meats would be contaminated by ptomaine. Under normal conditions, this was not enough cause scurvy. Not only did fresh food consumed in the diet have a kind of antidote effect (whether it worked by neutralizing the poison, or by simply displacing it in the diet, was not clear), but environment also played an important role. Certain factors seemed to predispose people to chronic ptomaine poisoning, including darkness, intense exertion, idleness, close air, prolonged confinement and cold.

On prolonged journeys under harsh conditions, the accumulated ptomaine in badly preserved meats would disrupt health, giving the classic symptoms of scurvy. Once the tainted foods were discontinued, the body would rapidly excrete the accumulated ptomaine and return to healthh.

To the extent that citrus juices were effective in preventing scurvy, it was because their acidity denatured ptomaines, or killed the bacteria that caused them. The real culprit was in the bad meat, and the casks of lime juice mandated by law on every seagoing ship were another example of outdated medical superstition that would now give way to a more sophisticated understanding of illness.

This was the latest in medical thinking on scurvy when Scott prepared for his first expedition to Antarctica, in 1903. It would be the first serious British expedition to the continent in fifty years. Scott took the very same Dr. Koettlitz along as his chief physician.

Scott was a meticulous planner, and mindful of the ptomaine theory, paid special attention to the quality of his provisions. While the cold and cramped conditions of the journey could not be helped, he knew he could avoid any risk of scurvy by using only completely unspoiled canned goods. For his part, Koettlitz predicted that as long as there was fresh seal meat available, "we can take it as certain that no scurvy will be heard of in connexion with the expedition, however long it may remain in the High South".

Scott did not have time to supervise the actual canning of his provisions for the Discovery journey, but he made sure that before being served, all tins were opened in the presence of his medical staff, including Dr. Koettlitz, and carefully examined for signs of spoilage. Any doubtful cans were consigned to the trash heap.

So it came as a bitter surprise to Scott when one of the Discovery’s early sledging parties trudged into camp with unmistakable symptoms of scurvy after only a three week absence. Subsequent examination showed that many of the men on the ship were also in the early stages of the disease. The preventative measures had failed, and Scott was greatly distressed:

The evil having come, the great thing now is to banish it. In my absence, Armitage, in consultation with the doctors, has already taken steps to remedy matters by serving out fresh meat regularly and by increasing the allowance of bottled fruits, and he has done an even greater service by taking the cook in hand. I don’t know whether he threatened to hang him at the yardarm or used more persuasive measures, but, whatever it was, there is a marked improvement in the cooking.
...
With the idea of giving everyone on the mess-deck a change of air in turn, we have built up a space in the main hut by packing cases around the stove. In this space each mess are to live for a week; they have breakfast and dinner on board, but are allowed to cook their supper in the hut. The present occupants enjoy this sort of picnic-life immensely.

We have had a thorough clearance of the holds, disinfected the bilges, whitewashed the sides, and generally made them sweet and clean.

As a next step I tackled the clothes and hammocks. One knows how easily garments collect, and especially under such conditions as ours; however, they have all been cleared out now, except those actually in use. The hammocks and bedding I found quite dry and comfortable, but we have had them all thoroughly aired. We have cleared all the deck-lights so as to get more daylight below, and we have scrubbed the decks and cleaned out all the holes and corners until everything is as clean as a new pin. I am bound to confess there was no very radical change in all this; we found very little dirt, and our outbreak cannot possibly have come from insanitary conditions of living; our men are far too much alive to their own comfort for that. But now we do everything for the safe side, and from the conviction that one cannot be too careful.

Scott sent a seal-killing party to collect as much fresh meat as possible (his crew could eat their way through a seal in two and a half days). They gathered enough to eliminate the need for preserved meat entirely. The butchered seals were stored, like logs, frozen on the ice. Meanwhile, Koetlittz had managed to sprout and grow a modest crop of watercress under a skylight, the Antarctic soil proving surprisingly fertile. His confidence in the ptomaine theory did not blind him to the practical advantages of a proven remedy (watercress sprouts contain a ridiculous amount of vitamin C). Enough cress grew to supplement one meal for all the men, and in combination with the fresh seal meat, it was enough to banish all signs of scurvy.

Scott was relieved, but he knew that something had escaped his understanding. Despite scrupulous care, the disease had slipped through, and he was not sure why his precautions had failed. Evidently it was not enough to inspect meat by taste and smell - even minute quanities of ptomaine might be enough to cause scurvy.

His solution was to move the expedition off of canned meat altogether, relying entirely on seal meat and penguin. This would be fine while the men remained on the Discovery, but it left the problem of what to do about the upcoming sledge journeys. The planned sledging ration was pemmican (a mixture of dried meat and fat) and biscuit, but since Scott had lost all confidence in the safety of preserved meat, he had to find a way to replace the pemmican with seal.

Fresh seal meat would be far too heavy a replacement, so Scott had it repeatedly boiled to remove as much moisture as possible (in the process destroying all its vitamin C). This concentrated seal meat was still almost twice as heavy as the equivalent pemmican, but it was the best he could do.

In November of 1902, Scott, Wilson and Shackleton set out on the expedition’s main journey. Their goal was to take a dog team as far south as possible along the Ross ice shelf, and see if they could find a useful route for an eventual attempt at the Pole.

Things did not go well. Scott inadvertently starved his dogs, making them impossible to control and nearly useless for hauling. Very quickly, his men had to start relaying the sledges, which meant walking three miles for every one mile of southward progress. They began killing the weakest dogs and feeding them to the remainder (the dogs were so hungry they did not hesitate to rip their fallen comrades apart). The men themselves could think of nothing else but food, their rations inadequate for the work of hauling the sledge.

Wilson, a doctor, checked the men’s gums and legs each Sunday for signs of scurvy. Shackleton was the first to show symptoms, though he was not told about this for several weeks. Soon Scott and Wilson were showing symptoms as well. Before long Shackleton was weak, had begun to cough up blood at night, and was in real danger of physical collapse.

The party barely made it home. For much of the return trip, Shackleton was unable to pull, staggering alongside the sledges. On their return to the Discovery, the men were bedridden and in a state of complete physical collapse, getting up only long enough to eat prodigious meals. Scott remarked in his journal on the extraordinary lassitude and lack of energy the disease provoked in him.

Eight years after the Discovery expedition, Scott returned to Antarctica to make an attempt at the Pole. Mindful of what had happened on his first journey, he took pains to seek the latest expert advice about scurvy, both from doctors and from Arctic explorers.

The advice he got was unchanged - scurvy was an acidic condition of the blood caused by ptomaines in tainted meat. The legendary explorer Fridtjof Nansen had some particularly curious advice - if he found himself in extremis, Nansen said, it was better to choose cans of meat that were completely rotten over cans that were only slightly spoilt, since the ptomaines were more likely to have broken down in the former.

This time Scott made sure to provide his men with fresh seal meat, and scurvy was not a problem in the main camp. In the austral winter of 1911, Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard went on a phantasmagoric five week journey to try and collect the eggs of the empreror penguin. This journey, which gave Cherry-Garrard’s book its title, took place in complete darkness and temperatures that dropped below -77˙ Fahrenheit. The men, forced to relay and searching for their footprints by candlelight, sometimes made as little as a mile of progress a day. When Cherry-Garrard’s clothes were weighed on his return, they contained twenty four-pounds of ice. That the men survived defies belief - there has never been another journey in the Polar night, even with modern equipment - but they did return, and to Scott's great relief showed no symptoms of scurvy.

One of Scott's goals for the winter journey had been to determine the proper ration for sledging up on the Polar plateau, where the men would have to hike for several weeks at altitudes above 10,000 feet. After some tinkering with proportions, the men on the Winter Journey had settled on a satisfying ration, and Scott decided to adopt it unchanged for his on trip later that year:

Scott's Polar ration: 450g biscuit, 340 grams pemmican, 85g sugar, 57g butter, 24g tea, 16g cocoa. This ration contains about 4500 calories (sledging requires 6500) and no vitamin C.

Scott left camp with 16 men on November 1, 1911. His plan was to lay depots along the route, and send groups of men back at intervals until he was left with three companions on the great plateau south of the Beardmore Glacier. The expedition used men, dogs, ponies (slaughtered and fed to the dogs at the foot of the glacier), and a pair of experimental motorized sledges that broke down after just a few miles on the ice.

Scott sent back his men in stages; each group had a progressively harder time making it back to camp. The last group, sent back from the top of the Beardmore, was led by Edward Evans, who quickly developed a severe case of scurvy. After bravely walking most of the distance, he became incapacitated and had to be left on the ice in the care of a companion while the third man in the group force-marched the thirty remaining miles to camp to summon a rescue team.

Scott, oblivious to this ominous development, pressed onwards. The rest of his story is well known. Norwegian tents at the Pole, an increasingly desperate return, two in his group sickening and dying, then a terrible blizzard eleven miles short of his last depot; the three men freezing to death in their tent.

The evidence that the Polar Party suffered from scurvy on their return trip is strong but circumstantial. The wounds that would not heal, the sudden death of Seaman Evans during the descent down the Beardmore, their great weakness are all consistent with the disease. Both Scott and Wilson would have easily recognized the symptoms, but it is possible that they would have chosen not to record them. There was a certain stigma with scurvy, especially in their case, having taken such pains to forestall the disease. Scott had nearly left any mention of scurvy out of his 1903 report, before deciding to do so for the cause of science, and it’s possible he felt a similar reticence now.

Entire academic careers have been devoted to second-guessing Scott's final journey. It would probably be easier to list the few things that didn’t contribute to his death, than to try and rank the relative contributions of cold, exhaustion, malnutrition, bad weather, bad luck, poor planning, and rash decisions. But with regard to scurvy, at least, the Polar explorers were in an impossible position.

They had a theory of the disease that made sense, fit the evidence, but was utterly wrong. They had arrived at the idea of an undetectable substance in their food, present in trace quantities, with a direct causative relationship to scurvy, but they thought of it in terms of a poison to avoid. In one sense, the additional leap required for a correct understanding was very small. In another sense, it would have required a kind of Copernican revolution in their thinking.

It was pure luck that led to the actual discovery of vitamin C. Axel Holst and Theodor Frolich had been studying beriberi (another deficiency disease) in pigeons, and when they decided to switch to a mammal model, they serendipitously chose guinea pigs, the one animal besides human beings and monkeys that requires vitamin C in its diet. Fed a diet of pure grain, the animals showed no signs of beriberi, but quickly sickened and died of something that closely resembled human scurvy.

No one had seen scurvy in animals before. With a simple animal model for the disease in hand, it became a matter of running the correct experiments, and it was quickly established that scurvy was a deficiency disease after all. Very quickly the compound that prevents the disease was identified as a small molecule present in cabbage, lemon juice, and many other foods, and in 1932 Szent-Györgyi definitively isolated ascorbic acid.

---

There are several aspects of this 'second coming’ of scurvy in the late 19th century that I find particularly striking:

First, the fact that from the fifteenth century on, it was the rare doctor who acknowledged ignorance about the cause and treatment of the disease. The sickness could be fitted to so many theories of disease - imbalance in vital humors, bad air, acidification of the blood, bacterial infection - that despite the existence of an unambigous cure, there was always a raft of alternative, ineffective treatments. At no point did physicians express doubt about their theories, however ineffective.

Second, how difficult it was to correctly interpret the evidence without the concept of "vitamin". Now that we understand scurvy as a deficiency disease, we can explain away the anomalous results that seem to contradict that theory (the failure of lime juice on polar expeditions, for example). But the evidence on its own did not point clearly at any solution. It was not clear which results were the anomalous ones that needed explaining away. The ptomaine theory made correct predictions (fresh meat will prevent scurvy) even though it was completely wrong.

Third, how technological progress in one area can lead to surprising regressions. I mentioned how the advent of steam travel made it possible to accidentaly replace an effective antiscorbutic with an ineffective one. An even starker example was the rash of cases of infantile scurvy that afflicted upper class families in the late 19th century. This outbreak was the direct result of another technological development, the pasteurization of cow's milk. The procedure made milk vastly safer for infants to drink, but also destroyed vitamin C. For poorer children, who tended to be breast-fed and quickly weaned onto adult foods, this was not an issue, but the wealthy infants fed a special diet of cooked cereals and milk were at grave risk. It took several years for infant scurvy, at first called "Barlow's disease", to be properly identified. At that point, doctors were caught between two fires. They could recommend that parents not boil their milk, and expose the children to bacterial infection, or they could insist on pasteurization at the risk of scurvy. The prevaling theory of scurvy as bacterial poisoning clouded the issue further, so that it took time to arrive at the right solution - supplementing the diet with onion juice or cooked potato.

Fourth, how small a foundation of evidence was necessary to build a soaring edifice of theory. Lind’s famous experiment, for example, had two sailors eating oranges for six days. Lind went on to propound a completely ineffective method of preserving lemon juice (by boiling it down), which he never thought to test. One of the experiments that ’confirmed’ the ptomaine theory involved feeding a handful of monkeys canned and fresh meat. The fructivorous monkeys died within days; the ones who died last, and with the least blood in their stool, were assumed to be the ones without scurvy. And even these flawed experiments were a rarity compared to the number of flat assertions by medical authorities without any testing or basis in fact.

Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world - depression, autism, hypertension, obesity - will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious?

In the course of writing this essay, I was tempted many times to pick a villain. Maybe the perfectly named Almroth Wright, who threw his considerable medical reputation behind the ptomaine theory and so delayed the proper re-understanding of scurvy for many years. Or the nameless Admiralty flunkie who helped his career by championing the switch to West Indian limes. Or even poor Scott himself, sermonizing about the virtues of scientific progress while never conducting a proper experiment, taking dreadful risks, and showing a most unscientific reliance on pure grit to get his men out of any difficulty.

But the villain here is just good old human ignorance, that master of disguise. We tend to think that knowledge, once acquired, is something permanent. Instead, even holding on to it requires constant, careful effort.

tl;dr: scurvy bad, science hard.

I'll try to footnote this essay properly in the next few days; in the meantime, if you'd like to geek out with me I invite you to check out a list of collected links.

Scott And Scurvy

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

I have been re-reading one of my favorite books, Ã¸The Worst Journey in the World, an account of Robert Falcon Scott's 1911 expedition to the South Pole. I canâ€™t do the book justice in a summary, other than recommend that you drop everything and read it, but there is one detail that particularly baffled me the first time through, and that I resolved to understand better once I could stand to put the book down long enough.

Writing about the first winter the men spent on the ice, Cherry-Garrard casually mentions an astonishing lecture on scurvy by one of the expeditionâ€™s doctors:

Atkinson inclined to Almroth Wrightâ€™s theory that scurvy is due to an acid intoxication of the blood caused by bacteria...
There was little scurvy in Nelsonâ€™s days; but the reason is not clear, since, according to modern research, lime-juice only helps to prevent it. We had, at Cape Evans, a salt of sodium to be used to alkalize the blood as an experiment, if necessity arose. Darkness, cold, and hard work are in Atkinsonâ€™s opinion important causes of scurvy.

Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be mixed in with sailorsâ€™ grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long ocean voyages.

...

By all accounts scurvy is a horrible disease. Scott, who has reason to know, gives a succinct description:

The symptoms of scurvy do not necessarily occur in a regular order, but generally the first sign is an inflamed, swollen condition of the gums. The whitish pink tinge next the teeth is replaced by an angry red; as the disease gains ground the gums become more spongy and turn to a purplish colour, the teeth become loose and the gums sore. Spots appear on the legs, and pain is felt in old wounds and bruises; later, from a slight oedema, the legs, and then the arms, swell to a great size and become blackened behind the joints. After this the patient is soon incapacitated, and the last horrible stages of the disease set in, from which death is a merciful release.

It has been known since antiquity that fresh foods in general, and lemons and oranges in particular, will cure scurvy. Starting with Vasco de Gamaâ€™s crew in 1497, sailors have repeatedly discovered the curative power of citrus fruits, and the cure has just as frequently been forgotten or ignored by subsequent explorers.

The scheduled allowance for the sailors in the Navy was fixed at I oz.lemon juice with I + oz. sugar, served daily after 2 weeks at sea, the lemon juice being often called â€˜lime juiceâ€™ and our sailors â€˜lime juicersâ€™. The consequences of this new regulation were startling and by the beginning of the nineteenth century scurvy may be said to have vanished from the British navy. In 1780, the admissions of scurvy cases to the Naval Hospital at Haslar were 1457; in the years from 1806 to 1810, they were two.

(As we'll see, the confusion between lemons and limes would have serious reprecussions.)

By the 1870s, therefore, most British ships were sailing without protection against scurvy. Only speed and improved nutrition on land were preventing sailors from getting sick.

The expedition proper ate fresh meat regularly at least once a day in the shape of polar bear. The people on the ship had, however, a prejudice against this food, which certainly was not particularly palatable, and insisted, against all advice, upon eating their preserved and salted meat. This meat I occasionally noticed to be somewhat "high" or "gamey", and afterwards heard that it was often so. The result was that, though I visited the ship every day, and personally saw that each man swallowed his dose of lime juice (which was made compulsory, and was of the best quality), the whole shipâ€™s company were tainted with scurvy, and two died.

That the cause of the outbreak of scurvy in so many Polar expeditions has always been that something was radically wrong with the preserved meats, whether tinned or salted, is practically certain; that foods are scurvy-producing by being, if only slightly, tainted is practically certain; that the benefit of the so-called "antiscorbutics" is a delusion, and that some antiscorbutic property has been removed from foods in the process of preservation is also a delusion. An animal food is either scorbutic - in other words, scurvy-producing - or it is not. It is either tainted or it is sound. Putrefactive change, if only slight and tasteless, has taken place or it has not. Bacteria have been able to produce ptomaines in it or they have not; and if they have not, then the food is healthy and not scurvy-producing.

The â€™ptomaineâ€™ in the theory was never really defined, other than as a noxious waste product of bacterial action. But the theory had an internal logic. Poorly preserved meats would be contaminated by ptomaine. Under normal conditions, this was not enough cause scurvy. Not only did fresh food consumed in the diet have a kind of antidote effect (whether it worked by neutralizing the poison, or by simply displacing it in the diet, was not clear), but environment also played an important role. Certain factors seemed to predispose people to chronic ptomaine poisoning, including darkness, intense exertion, idleness, close air, prolonged confinement and cold.

So it came as a bitter surprise to Scott when one of the Discoveryâ€™s early sledging parties trudged into camp with unmistakable symptoms of scurvy after only a three week absence. Subsequent examination showed that many of the men on the ship were also in the early stages of the disease. The preventative measures had failed, and Scott was greatly distressed:

The evil having come, the great thing now is to banish it. In my absence, Armitage, in consultation with the doctors, has already taken steps to remedy matters by serving out fresh meat regularly and by increasing the allowance of bottled fruits, and he has done an even greater service by taking the cook in hand. I donâ€™t know whether he threatened to hang him at the yardarm or used more persuasive measures, but, whatever it was, there is a marked improvement in the cooking.
...
With the idea of giving everyone on the mess-deck a change of air in turn, we have built up a space in the main hut by packing cases around the stove. In this space each mess are to live for a week; they have breakfast and dinner on board, but are allowed to cook their supper in the hut. The present occupants enjoy this sort of picnic-life immensely.

We have had a thorough clearance of the holds, disinfected the bilges, whitewashed the sides, and generally made them sweet and clean.

As a next step I tackled the clothes and hammocks. One knows how easily garments collect, and especially under such conditions as ours; however, they have all been cleared out now, except those actually in use. The hammocks and bedding I found quite dry and comfortable, but we have had them all thoroughly aired. We have cleared all the deck-lights so as to get more daylight below, and we have scrubbed the decks and cleaned out all the holes and corners until everything is as clean as a new pin. I am bound to confess there was no very radical change in all this; we found very little dirt, and our outbreak cannot possibly have come from insanitary conditions of living; our men are far too much alive to their own comfort for that. But now we do everything for the safe side, and from the conviction that one cannot be too careful.

In November of 1902, Scott, Wilson and Shackleton set out on the expeditionâ€™s main journey. Their goal was to take a dog team as far south as possible along the Ross ice shelf, and see if they could find a useful route for an eventual attempt at the Pole.

Wilson, a doctor, checked the menâ€™s gums and legs each Sunday for signs of scurvy. Shackleton was the first to show symptoms, though he was not told about this for several weeks. Soon Scott and Wilson were showing symptoms as well. Before long Shackleton was weak, had begun to cough up blood at night, and was in real danger of physical collapse.

This time Scott made sure to provide his men with fresh seal meat, and scurvy was not a problem in the main camp. In the austral winter of 1911, Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard went on a phantasmagoric five week journey to try and collect the eggs of the empreror penguin. This journey, which gave Cherry-Garrardâ€™s book its title, took place in complete darkness and temperatures that dropped below -77Ë™ Fahrenheit. The men, forced to relay and searching for their footprints by candlelight, sometimes made as little as a mile of progress a day. When Cherry-Garrardâ€™s clothes were weighed on his return, they contained twenty four-pounds of ice. That the men survived defies belief - there has never been another journey in the Polar night, even with modern equipment - but they did return, and to Scott's great relief showed no symptoms of scurvy.

Scott's Polar ration: 450g biscuit, 340 grams pemmican, 85g sugar, 57g butter, 24g tea, 16g cocoa. This ration contains about 4500 calories (sledging requires 6500) and no vitamin C.

Entire academic careers have been devoted to second-guessing Scott's final journey. It would probably be easier to list the few things that didnâ€™t contribute to his death, than to try and rank the relative contributions of cold, exhaustion, malnutrition, bad weather, bad luck, poor planning, and rash decisions. But with regard to scurvy, at least, the Polar explorers were in an impossible position.

---

There are several aspects of this 'second comingâ€™ of scurvy in the late 19th century that I find particularly striking:

Fourth, how small a foundation of evidence was necessary to build a soaring edifice of theory. Lindâ€™s famous experiment, for example, had two sailors eating oranges for six days. Lind went on to propound a completely ineffective method of preserving lemon juice (by boiling it down), which he never thought to test. One of the experiments that â€™confirmedâ€™ the ptomaine theory involved feeding a handful of monkeys canned and fresh meat. The fructivorous monkeys died within days; the ones who died last, and with the least blood in their stool, were assumed to be the ones without scurvy. And even these flawed experiments were a rarity compared to the number of flat assertions by medical authorities without any testing or basis in fact.

tl;dr: scurvy bad, science hard.

I'll try to footnote this essay properly in the next few days; in the meantime, if you'd like to geek out with me I invite you to check out a list of collected links.

On Top Of The World

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Using WordPress to generate flat files

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Some readers have emailed asking me for more specifics about how to run WordPress offline, like I suggested in my last post. So I spent a couple of hours struggling with it last night to get a sense of what it would take.

This is an almost useless and jargon-packed summary, but my hope is that some intrepid WP user may try following these steps and use them as a starting point for a proper HOWTO.

If you want comments, you'll need to switch from whatever is built in to WordPress to an outside JavaScript-based service like disqus. Disqus can import your existing comments when you set it up. Disclaimer: I have never used this service and know nothing about it - there may be better alternatives.

Set up WordPress on the machine where you want to do your writing and editing. The WP site has copious instructions for all kinds of installation scenarios.

Configure WP to use 'fancy' permalinks - not the default, which uses query string parameters. Basically, if there's a question mark in the URL, you can't mirror the site. If you're on OS X, you will now have to struggle with mod_rewrite and .htaccess permissions for a while.

Configure WP to allow robots access (otherwise wget will not work in the next step).

Use wget to crawl your new blog and turn it into a bunch of static files:
wget --mirror -p --html-extension --convert-links http://your.local.url/
What this does is explained in detail here. I've left off some unnecessary flags.

Set up apache on your blog server to serve static content from wherever you want your blog files to live.

Now copy over the static files you created with wget to their new home on the remote machine using a secure transfer method like rsync or sftp.

Laugh in the face of mankind / email me about why this didn't work.

Good luck, and please let me know if you are able to follow these steps and produce a more helpful HOWTO that I can link to.

How To Not Get Your Blog Hacked

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

I am going to break with seven years of precedent and indulge in a little bit of blog software wank.

Recently an exploit has surfaced in WordPress, a popular kind of blog software. If you run WordPress on a public server, an attacker can get full access to your site and do nasty things, up to and including deleting all your data. If you listen to the WordPress people, the answer to this is 'be extremely zealous about updating your software', which is the same as saying, devote half your life to learning and understanding WordPress administration.

If you listen to me, the answer is much simpler. Do not run this kind of software on a public server. Either host your blog with a competent centralized site (like LiveJournal or Blogger) that takes the burden of upgrading, backing up and patching off your hands, or use whatever personal publishing software you like (WordPress, Movable Type, and so on), but keep it on a local machine.

You can use a program like wget or curl to generate a flat HTML version of your website from this local version, and then upload these files to your public server to share them with the world. Now there is no way you can get hacked, because your server is just serving static files. As a bonus, you don't have to worry about your site ever going down because of database problems or excessive load. And as another bonus, you now have a remote backup of your blog.

If you want comments or other fanciness (why??), you might need a little more complicated setup than this. But the basic idea of keeping your administrative interface off the internet will save you endless angst as these exploits keep coming. WordPress has an especially terrible track record with security, but all these programs are just accidents waiting to happen.

If you have a blog setup that you think is insecure but don't know how to begin fixing it, feel free to email me and I will do my best to point you at an answer.

The O-Zone Romanian Proficiency Exam

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Because of the internet, the first Romanian words I ever learned were about love and linden trees. Now that I've been living in the country for a while, I thought I would check to see how many other Numa Numan secrets were within my understanding:

Alo? Salut! Sunt eu, un haiduc
și te rog iubirea mea primește, fericirea.
Alo? Alo! Sunt eu, Picasso.
Ți-am dat beep și sunt voinic
dar să știi nu-ți cer nimic.

Vrei să pleci dar nu mă, nu mă iei,
Nu mă, nu mă iei,
Nu mă, nu mă, nu mă iei,
Chipul tău și dragostea din tei
mi-amintesc de ochii tăi.

Te sun sa-ți spun ce simt acum.
Alo, iubirea mea. Sunt eu, fericirea.
Alo? Alo! Sunt iarași eu, Picasso.
Ți-am dat beep și sunt voinic
dar să știi nu-ți cer nimic.

Nu foarte bine...